Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has risked inflaming Coalition tensions
by insisting the Government is not looking at tougher labour laws to limit
strikes.

Hundreds of thousands of public sector staff including teachers will walk out on Thursday, protesting against Coalition plans to make them pay more towards their pensions.

Senior Conservatives including Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, have said the Government should toughen strike laws to require a minimum threshold of union members to back a strike before it would be legal.

Downing Street said last week that the Government had “contingency plans” to curb excessive industrial action, but Mr Cable, whose department oversees labour legislation, said he was not looking at new laws. “We’re not looking at that, and we’re not planning it, and we certainly don’t want to go down that road,” he told BBC 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics. Mr Cable accused both Conservatives and union leaders of taking a confrontational approach to the pension talks. He said: “There are people who for their own reason want conflict both on the trade union side and on the opposite side.”

Mr Cable’s tone is in stark contrast with the approach taken by many Conservative ministers. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, warned yesterday that teachers were losing public sympathy and insisted that new strike laws had to be an option.

Meanwhile, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, is known to be reviewing rules that allow public sector trade union officials to work full-time on union business while drawing their salary from the taxpayer.

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Even more schools than feared will be closed by teachers’ strikes on Thursday because unions have not given heads vital information about staffing, parents were warned yesterday.

Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the scale of the disruption would be far greater than previously believed.

Members of two teaching unions, the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, are striking over plans to make them pay more for their pensions.

It has been estimated that around half of all schools in England and Wales will have to close, with head teachers managing to keep others at least partly open.

But Mr Hobby said that heads who intend to keep their schools open were struggling to plan because individual teachers are not obliged to tell them whether they are going on strike. Unions must inform each head of the date of the strike and the number of teachers expected to walk out, but do not have to give details of which staff will strike. Mr Hobby said that the lack of information made it harder for heads to plan their emergency cover.

“Names are important because it matters whether it’s a Year One or a Year Six teacher walking out,” he said. “Heads need to know whether their science or maths teachers will be in school in order to plan a schedule of lessons.